Before becoming
a professional writer, Aphra Behn was a professional spy for
England, code-named "Astrea" or Agent 160. She was
the first professional female writer in England, and for the
first twenty years of her career, she was the only female playwright.
It was rumored that she was James II's mistress. However, we
know very little else about her life. The Restoration,
as a period, was badly documented, and the institutions that
did keep records, Oxford and Cambridge, the Inns of Court and
the Middle Temple, excluded women from their ranks. So our understanding
of Ms. Behn's life must depend on the writings she left behind,
the voices of her characters, the repeated themes and expressions.

Perhaps as a result of her one certain activity, espionage,
Ms. Behn was fascinated with the entanglement of sex and power,
both in the personal and political spheres. And because this
was considered an inappropriate subject for a woman, she was,
for centuries after her death, simply regarded as a smutty writer.
The Marquis of Halifax went so far as to blame Behn for the oppression
of other women when he remarked, "The unjustifiable freedom
of some of your sex have involved the rest in the penalty of
being reduced."

In recent years, however, Ms. Behn has been rediscovered by
a more liberal generation of readers and performers. Her plays
are now read throughout the English-speaking world and are regarded
not as vulgar sexploits, but rather as legitimate and sensual
explorations of gender, race and class.

It was Virginia Woolf who wrote, "All women together
ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it
was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."